


daylight could be so violent

by Goldmonger



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Force Visions, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Self-Hatred, Torture, just like anakin ha ha, this started small then became a monster
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:54:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24120907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldmonger/pseuds/Goldmonger
Summary: Obi-Wan is exiled on Tatooine, but he's not alone. He'll never be alone again.Master?I know it's you.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Luke Skywalker, Qui-Gon Jinn & Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 12
Kudos: 85





	daylight could be so violent

**Author's Note:**

> * Title from the lyrics of [No Light, No Light](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD_9m1WJFzk) by Florence and the Machine. (Very applicable here.) [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJrEkTEkE4Q) and [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDa8eKL8Byc) also get me in the mood to be sad
> 
> * Written as a very late May the Fourth contribution! Also after that Clone Wars finale..... ouch.

When human flesh burns, the skin parts over the muscle like a tearing cobweb. The fat melts, dripping as grease over the ravelling epidermis, dermis, and subcutaneous tissue, the char stark against the garish scarlet of the meat beneath. This cooks before it, too, burns; the striations become lax, and slide away from the bone. You will see ribs, femurs, and the knob of a cauterised humerus winking from under folds of black.

Human eyeballs should pop and leak out their sockets in a gelatine, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they watch, molten gold irises and abraded sclera bulging, unblinking, apprehending. They might become alight with a fury that’s impotent and blazing, fit to rupture like a roar from a swollen, bleeding throat.

Dirty blonde hair, downy soft, will crisp. It’ll vanish like Coruscanti candy floss in water.

What’s leftover will be scabrous, its nerves deadened by fire. You shouldn’t feel sorry for it. It can’t feel anything anymore.

You can even pretend this thing, this numb entity, is dead.

Yes.

Yes, that will make you feel better.

*

When he wakes, Qui-Gon is smiling placidly down at him. He makes as though to tuck a strand of unwashed hair behind his ear, diaphanous fingers not quite stroking his bristly cheek.

“You are unwell.”

He swipes a hand over his eyes. He thinks he smells a bonfire.

“Yes, Master.”

Qui-Gon kneels beside his cot, rolls back his thin blanket. He’s sweating in what must be mid-afternoon, judging by the height of the suns through the aperture over his sink, but then he has been tossing in moisture all night. He has become prone to hot flashes, even under the cold and empty sky of the dark desert.

“You know, you can say something else to me.”

He licks his cracking lips, tastes salt. “Yes, Master.”

Qui-Gon’s brow furrows in displeasure, and he retrieves his weightless caresses. “Petulance does not become you, Padawan.”

He rises slowly, with a grunt. His limbs do not obey him the way they did in the war; he supposes he is paying for the debts incurred from engaging in so many duels.

“I apologise, Master,” he says to Qui-Gon, who solemnly waits before him. “It is learned behaviour.”

There is baritone laughter, somewhere to his right. He knows better than to look for its source.

“Indeed,” replies Qui-Gon. “We teachers change as much as our students, in our lessons. While steeped in their presence, we are altered, irrevocably.”

“Yes, Master,” he says quietly.

The ‘fresher is dank and the faucets creak and sputter, but he stands still under the four-second spurt of water like it is the benediction of a deity, an exquisite waste. He is massaged by the pathetic pressure of it, bludgeoning his eyelids and forehead, unsticking his tongue when he opens his mouth. It seems he has barely moved when his timer clanks, the meter spinning over to red, and he’s reminded how dirty he is, an animal caged in a tube of transparisteel. He climbs out, combs his scraggly hair with his fingers, and tries to avoid the creature in the mirror. Its veins wend across it like binding rope. Its stomach is sunken, like a refugee on an annexed planet. It makes bruises that take weeks to fade.

“You need about a gallon of rycrit stew,” someone says. “It would go down great with my mom’s Haroun. You know she made them in buns?”

Anakin’s fourteen, at the moment. It’s given away by the fresh scrapes on his hands, the ones he’d gotten wrestling his lightsaber from a gundark’s forelegs. He could have sworn he’d told him to wrap them when they got back to the temple, both of them doused in viscous blood and muck from the nest, grinning like a pair of hooligans. Perhaps their survival had inebriated him, loosened his duty into a choice.

He thinks, I’m not hungry. He hasn’t felt hunger in years. Anakin’s face flickers, yawns into the hollowed countenance of adulthood.

“Why?” Anakin is closer, too close, and he wants to cough. Smoke tickles the back of his throat, the fumes sickly and sweet.

He knows he’s ill, foaming with a disease of the mind. He steps back, and his feet slide on the damp floor.

“Well don’t make it worse by braining yourself,” says Anakin, and he extends his hand, clinches his wrist in a vice. “I’ve got you now. See?”

The lukewarm ‘fresher doesn’t steam, yet he’s plunged into a cloud of grey. Embers spark around his ankles.

“What is it, Master?” enquires Anakin, flayed pink and white, perforated by flame. “Why are you frightened?” His padawan robes adhere to the patches of him that melt, subsumed into his flesh. “I won’t let you go.”

_“Obi-Wan.”_

His master’s rumble drags his attention back to the other chamber of his hut, browning inside and out with sand and filth. When he turns away from the tall silhouette by his bed, Anakin is gone.

Around his wrist is a band of red. It hurts, to touch.

*

He dons his yellowed underclothes and a makeshift tunic beneath his robe, cobbled together with hard linen that he’d hurriedly bartered from an agitated Jawa merchant during a communal exodus from the Jundland Wastes. Older tribes still dotted the arroyos to the north, but the drought had brought many of their kind closer to Anchorhead, where the itinerant dregs of Mos Eisley had operable water purification filters and a taste for marking them up for credits and weapons. It was a fair trade then, less so two years in, but travelling back across the Dune Sea is no mean feat, and he knows the Jawas must be loath to attempt it in the height of summer. No matter that he could really use a working HoloNet system, and another stack of MRE sachets to go on top of the water begged twice a month. He might deflect Qui-Gon’s intrusions, but he’s right all the same about his jaundice and deflated belly. He won’t last much longer on dust.

“Why not?”

On top of his canvas tent he packs a rubber bag of water – the last of his rations – and tinted lenses on wire for when the suns beat off the white sand. He stows phials of sodium replacement and a crust of bread that he gnaws on half-heartedly.

“More than I ever got.”

He bandages his lower face with a scarf and pulls up his hood. He loads up with his rucksack and dials open the door.

“Forgetting something?”

He makes himself breathe deeply, even in the aridity of a blistering afternoon. Anakin is sitting on a low shelf and swinging his mechanical legs, tossing Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber back and forth from one hand to the other. Gears grind and whine there too, as he moves, at his elbows as well as his knees. The durasteel plates shine in the light, brighter and more complex than the only cybernetic he’d known Anakin to build.

He thinks of Grievous, the rotor blades and augmentations that made a man into a living horror.

He leans forward and snags the lightsaber from his grip, clipping it to his belt. He tucks his vest around it, then obscures it by way of four tangled layers. He busies himself, manages to fumble his way out the door before he can be called back.

He strides out of the shade, as best he can. He walks. He walks.

*

He makes camp beneath a rock outcropping, and has to challenge fengbeetles for bivouac rights. They scuttle in and out while he dozes anyway, precious sweat breaking at his hairline and dribbling, tantalisingly, into the grit by his feet. Fuzzily, he bends for it, but all that remains is a dark spot, smudged lighter when his finger makes contact. He sways slightly, knows he’s been reckless. He cannot afford such refuse as this.

He settles back, cross-legged. He pretends to meditate, pretends he is oblivious to the breathing at his back, the spine that presses against his own. The sky ignites, wildfire that catches on swatches of cloud and greedily spreads, one star to its bleeding brother. They are ruddy when they sink together. He loses them behind a jut of sandstone.

“Normally I’m the one that’s distracted,” says Ahsoka. Her rear lekku butts the nape of his neck in chastisement.

“I seek distraction,” he murmurs. Ahsoka’s scapulae are daggers. They carve into him with precision.

“From me?” There is intrigue in her voice, not offence. She has been broiled in war since childhood. In her adolescence she commanded an army, and earned the respect of veteran fighters. Here and now she listens to him with the ear of a comrade, not a girl.

“From the dead.”

She sighs, and her corporeality disappears. He tips his head back just to be certain, thinks that surely he will be knocked away, nudged, or leapt upon in a brief, puerile lapse of decorum, like during the aftermath of that mission in the Ryndullia system. She had been ecstatic with victory, and Anakin hadn’t minded a hug – why would he?

Protruding montrals greet him when he looks down again, the rounded stubs of a juvenile. Ahsoka is cross-legged too, in front of him this time. Her facial markings are marred with dark flecks. Her hands rest on her thighs, but they are not joined. They lift, every so often, to the hole in her abdomen.

“No. Not me.”

Had the lightsaber been red when it killed all those younglings, or had it been blue? He cannot remember. The holovid had fizzed in and out of coherence before him as he and Master Yoda watched Jedi after Jedi pitch to the tiled floor, on top of the immaculate marble and quartz mosaics, past the bronzium titans of old. The figures twirled forever. They lunged, were rendered static in their everlasting dance with the dark, but only for a moment, only for a flaring instant before they toppled. After that they heaped down hallways, trailed the shadow like footprints. They were ornamental, garish, trophies.

“Look at me.”

He appraises her, the last of his forebears’ lineage. The hole just below her sternum gapes; through it he can see the tent flap flutter in the breeze. The edges are seared black. She would not have bled out. She would have been simply interrupted, her organs riven and sealed in the same fluid, brutal motion. She would have known this, as it was happening. They all would have known this.

“You don’t know, do you?”

He is attentive. He likes to think he has always been. Ahsoka reaches out to him, into him, through him. He doesn’t want to look down.

“Master Kenobi, I think there’s something wrong with you.”

He has suffered torture, impaling, flagellation, blaster bolts all over his body and more, but nothing compares to the kiss of a lightsaber, even if it glances off an arm, a knuckle, if it skims past an ear or your navel. Nothing compares to the depraved purity of immolation.

“You should have been protected,” he tells her, the passive voice like a salve, a shortcut, a way out. He collects those, huddles to them like a maternal teat. “Our child, thrown into a warzone. You were mine, too. Do you know that? You should have known that.”

Ahsoka retreats, resumes a meditative pose. Her azure eyes close and somewhere a bird caws, not that of the ravenous raptors that circle the flats or a corvid screech, but softer. A convor, he thinks, out of nowhere. Tawny brown, maybe, with a glittering stare.

“You need sleep,” she says, and he imagines Qui-Gon’s timbre is overlaid with hers, a syncopated reprimand, sheer music. “Or you will not heal.”

“There is no healing.” He says it to the wound in her midsection. It is the exact breadth of a lightsaber hilt, like the perpetrator had plunged it as deep as it would go, as he had with so many others.

They were so small. Their little chests would have made no resistance. Yet their skin bubbled from the prejudicial impact.

Immolation, he thinks, and the convor squawks from his shoulder.

“You’re drifting. I can barely see you.”

The air is cooling, the ground uneven and cold beneath him. He thinks, I appear as an already looted corpse to the Raiders, I irritate the Jawas with flies, I repulse the Lars family. I hunch, the way a general has never hunched. He should declare, clearly I do not want to be seen.

“And yet.”

She knows him, kind but firm. He can’t recall being known, even if he can recall wanting that. He is sure they are not supposed to want that.

“I have severed myself.” He swallows. He occasionally brushes up against the Force and recoils, but it is patient. It senses his injury, his amputation. It knows that if he were to return himself entirely, if he became enveloped in the dull roar of agony that the genocide left, he would perish. It would be slow. He would seize until his heart gave out.

Ahsoka touches his sleeve and releases it slowly, possessive, but gentler than how Anakin would yank him down, over, away, insistent on his commentary or attention or proximity. She smells like fuchsia and stale pleather armour, not smoke, but it pervades the cramped space anyway. Perhaps his tent is aflame.

“Can you find me?” She is plaintive, urgent and clear. She is made of a vibrancy he has forgotten.

He does not answer, and Ahsoka writhes, becomes pearlescent: a mist through which he can see a million and one stars, dwarf moons and constellations he cannot name, even now. They are foreign to him here. He is landlocked, stuck with an astronomy that would be useless anywhere else in the galaxy. He has dug himself into a place that he deplores not for its attributes, but by association.

A body presses into his side, familiar as exhaustion. It inclines itself unconsciously towards the wisps that used to be Ahsoka, towards her remnants. They seem to exert a faint gravitational pull.

“Master.”

He remains rigid.

“Master, what’s here? What’s left?”

He inches away, curls up. He puts his head on his pack and drifts, the way Ahsoka claimed he was drifting. The way he wants to.

*

Anakin was ten when Obi-Wan was first called down to the crèche, the Carers buzzing like agitated hornets, accumulating in clusters outside the Junior Meditation Hall. Master Komara Vex waited for him at the bottom of the stairs with a raised eyebrow.

“Kenobi. You are late.”

He skidded to stop, twenty-four and still gangly, as yet unused to the absence of a padawan braid poking over his collar. He adjusted his stance, steadied his hammering pulse, and bowed.

“I apologise, Master. I was interfacing with the Exploration Corps in the eastern wing when I received your message. I was just about to ship out. Is he all right?”

Komara’s disgruntled amusement quickly withered, and she nodded behind her to the sliver of the chapel that could be seen through the crack in the double doors.

“I told him to wait there until you arrived. He is upset, but unharmed.”

Obi-Wan’s shoulders dropped in relief. The communique had been perfunctory, a brief missive regarding some scuffle among the younglings, but he’d sensed sincere discord through the bond he shared with Anakin. It was nothing that indicated danger, but it had disconcerted him all the same, its newness, even more than the trouble it implied.

Komara issued a command to one of the loitering Carers, a stout Rodian that clucked in acknowledgement. She dipped into the chapel and emerged with Anakin, who shuffled over slowly, like he was keen to delay the inevitable inquisition. Obi-Wan lifted his arm automatically and Anakin dove underneath it. Komara frowned, but did not comment.

“What happened?” he asked, but Anakin merely buried his face in the folds of his robe and clung there, limpet-like. Obi-Wan focused on funnelling a wave of serenity towards him, a practised tactic that he had learned virtually in the cradle, but it was met with only turmoil. Its vehemence was surprising. He found himself with stinging eyes and a reflexively curving back, like his instinct to shield had taken on an overpowering aspect.

“Padawan Skywalker,” intoned Komara, and the moment was broken. They both looked up at her.

“Please tell your Master what you did here today.”

Anakin’s anxiety overflowed and flooded to him, made him tense. The boy was an open book, broadcasting everything; it was a wonder the Carers hadn’t clamped down upon that yet.

He winced, then. That was his job. Of course.

“I was just playing, and I moved too fast, and Tarvi didn’t get out of the way in time.” The words gushed out like vomit. Anakin’s fists were wound into the hemp around his waist, and they squeezed, hard. Komara gestured for him to continue, the rest of the faculty spectating with grim anticipation.

“And I broke her arm.” Anakin’s narrow shoulder dug under his ribs. His voice was high, radiating irritation and distress, but beneath it Obi-Wan could sense something else. It was warm and compressed, but indecipherable, even to him.

“You sprained it, only,” said Komara, impassive. “But Initiate Wilhame claims that it was an act of intentional aggression towards her, and that is something we do not tolerate in this temple. Knight Kenobi, what are your thoughts on this matter?”

Obi-Wan cleared his throat, unearthed speech from his disbelief. He could not reconcile such a story with the child that wandered into his chambers every other evening with nightmares that left him in tears. He knew the boy to be tenacious, determined and headstrong at times, in lessons, but never violent. Never that.

“Is Initiate Wilhame badly hurt?” Anakin stiffened, beside him.

“She has been taken to the Halls of Healing,” said Komara smoothly. “She is understandably shaken, but on the mend.”

“Good,” said Obi-Wan. “That’s good.”

He thanked the Force that the girl hadn’t been named someone’s padawan yet. He wasn’t sure what sort of confrontation that would lead to, and he didn’t ever want to know.

“Anakin.” He extricated himself from the death grip, and sank into a crouch. He tapped the boy’s jaw until he met his gaze, burying his surprise from the set state of it. “I won’t be angry with you. I just want to understand what happened, and then we can talk about it together. Was it an accident?”

Anakin chewed the inside of his cheek. “I was playing, and she was right there.”

“You have to be clear. Was it on purpose?”

“No-oo.” Anakin fiddled with the seam at front of his robes. “Are you going to stay now?”

Komara was a sentinel to his left, her army of crèche Carers flanking her. They breathed carefully, as one, ostensibly trying to blend into the ornate walls of the ziggurat.

He pretended to consider the question, unease coiling around his chest and tightening with every second.

“Why do you ask that now?” he said, curating some neutrality. “We were speaking about Tarvi.”

Anakin shrugged. “Just wondering. You were going to go this morning. Are you still going to go?”

“Well – I have to make sure you’re all right first –,”

“I’m not!” Anakin threw his arms around his neck and locked them there. “I’m not!”

He wasn’t, Obi-Wan was literate enough in their newborn connection to sense that much, but his fear was one element of a veritable concoction of emotions that poured into him. He investigated further, projecting comfort, and when Anakin clenched him closer he felt it.

The satisfaction.

“Kenobi.”

He tried not to let dread infect the bond as he cautiously disengaged from the embrace, and stood. Komara was watching him, watching Anakin, with profound disappointment that she was taking no pains to disguise. “This behaviour is unacceptable.”

“I agree.” He kept a distance between himself and Anakin, one restraining hand on his shoulder. He appeared appropriately shamefaced, but he was untrained enough that he did not realise how evident his hope was to every Knight and Master present. “We will discuss this. He will be disciplined with further meditation and instruction on pacific diplomacy. I can assure you this will not happen again.”

He turned Anakin towards the assembled Jedi. “My padawan and I will visit Initiate Wilhame, and he will apologise. Anakin, I would like you to apologise as well to your Carers for this misdemeanour. It is not our way.”

“But I didn’t –!”

“Anakin.”

The boy stooped, resigned. “I’m sorry. I won’t hit anyone ever again.”

It was a generalised, simplified promise. Easily shattered. They were peacekeepers, after all, and they spent most of their lives scouring places where peace was nowhere to be found. Still, he was mollified, and allowed Anakin to cling to his hip because of it.

When Komara ushered him down the corridor under some pretence of official business, Anakin dawdled by the chapel, missing nothing. His protective streak billowed out and draped over him, like a net.

“This is not the first time he has drawn you from your duties,” said Komara, once they were out of earshot. She was reproving, reminding him of his own time in the crèche, but there had been little contention back then. He had been raised quietly in a batch of similarly gifted infants, not plucked from a life of slavery and dumped in the midst of much younger, more privileged, and openly suspicious schoolmates. Who knew how that could affect a person?

“He has undergone trauma,” said Obi-Wan, resenting the pleading tinge to the words. “He requires a bit more attention than most, perhaps –,”

“You give it too freely,” said Komara flatly. “Co-dependency will not serve him if he is to become one of us, Kenobi. You should know better than to indulge him.”

He felt his hackles rise, sought to defend Anakin from her presumption. He knew he was participating significantly in raising someone extraordinary, knew he required the kind of easy encouragement that Qui-Gon had granted him, the bolstering praise that had never met Obi-Wan’s own ears. Anakin was special.

Komara shook her head. “You are not his father, Obi-Wan. Here he will have ten thousand brothers and sisters, the only family he needs. You must not permit such flagrant attachment to disrupt that harmony.”

Anakin peered at them with plain curiosity, teetering on his tip-toes to see properly. His furiously mustered but feeble protection stuck to him, like snow.

“I will try,” he said, gritting out the phrase like it caused him physical discomfort. “But he needs a great deal of reassurance. He is used to being – well –,”

“Loved?” Komara laid a hand on his folded forearm, did not notice the spike of worry from the opposite end of the corridor. Their bond, strengthening each day with a potency that was jarring, thrummed with it. “I understand. But think of his future. How he must conduct himself.”

He agreed, on that day. The confusion and the hurt resounded for months between them.

“It’s time for you to grow up, Anakin,” he would reiterate, and lecture respectability, composure, enlightenment.

“We are dedicated to the galaxy,” he once said, Anakin seventeen and sullen, slouching in front of his dictations on the Jedi ethos. “Not other individuals.”

“The galaxy isn’t all that dedicated to me or you, though,” said Anakin. He flicked a spare bolt from Artoo’s chassis at him, sniggering at the resulting glower. “It’s mostly just space.”

“It is our duty to maintain that space too.”

“Why?”

He shifted, suddenly at a loss.

“Because. Because it is expected of us.”

The scene mutates, tranquillity into tumult. He becomes frail with age, bitter with failure.

The study is dark, darker than he normally liked to have his quarters. The temple echoes: explosions of laser beams on rock, ancient metal blasting inwards, the shrieks of the fleeing abruptly cut off, like a door has been slammed upon them. He swivels, tries to find some semblance of equilibrium. His mouth is dry and sore.

“Master?”

He doesn’t turn around again. Anakin is rasping, struggling to breathe. He coughs wetly, and spews smoke that fills the room, the galaxy.

“I know it’s you.”

The rasping intensifies, catches on wads of trapped viscera, but he’s floundering with the details – when had the study, his old schoolroom, become so comparable to a tomb? He reaches out. He sees only blackness, splaying itself bare.

“You abandoned me.”

He thinks, and many more. I becalmed us both, to neuter the threat.

Thunderous cadence and a dragged robe – no, a cloak, sibilant over tile, like a flag. He is close, closer.

“And now? Now you stink of fear.”

He faces it, him. A hand closes around his throat and squeezes, the way a boy might squeeze his father’s middle in a profession of loyalty, or desperation. It keeps him there. He could not leave, not even if he wanted.

“Obi-Wan.” A harsh exhale, a malefic bust. He can see his own terror, reflected back. Anakin’s hair spirals from its gleaming pate. Strands fall and burn like a hundred lit fuses.

_“Where are you?”_

He’s choking. He thinks, you are finishing what you started, then –

I have a duty –

It is not done –

He startles awake in his tent with a cry, scrabbling at his neck for the phantasmal grasp. His skin aches when he depresses it, and he imagines a ring of mottled violet. He lies back again, for a respite that does not come, rubs the crust from his lips, his eyes. He hacks something up, then again, and then does not stop for a long while.

He tentatively skirts the Force. He avoids the rot of his bond with Anakin like it’s rife with plague.

He remembers gnawing though that umbilical tether, remembers the pain that pierced him like a blade as he ripped it open and apart. He had scorched the foundation that birthed it. He had scattered it with salt to stave off weeds, to eschew the unnatural growth of poisons. It would be fallow forever.

_“Where are you?”_

Golden eyes glint from the foot of his bedroll.

He thinks, finally, finally. I am going insane.

*

Yoda is scowling when he cracks his gimer stick across his brow. The Grandmaster is wizened, beyond centuries. He has seen more dead Jedi than most.

“Centre yourself, you must.”

He is supine on the floor of a meditation chamber, the uppermost in the Temple Spire. It’s kept humid for Master Yoda’s comfort.

“We have been fools,” he says. “And now we are cowards.”

Master Yoda lays down his stick. His claws come to rest over his eyelids, delicately scraping the skin.

“Yet a task you have, Kenobi. Lost, we may be. Obsolete, we are not.”

*

He collapses the tent after draining the scant remains of his water supply. He rolls up the canvas and straps it to his back, gathers up the paraphernalia he’d convinced himself was necessary for the journey. He shakes sand out of his lank hair and the crevices of his clothes, but it trails from him whenever he moves anyway, like he is some wraith that the dunes shape and reclaim at will.

His carotid throbs when he touches it. His voice is the huff of an old man.

The hydration revives him enough to redirect his path towards the last known Jawa tribe in the Wastes. He lowers his hood and fashions a balaclava from his scarf and he shambles along, kicking up dust for several klicks until the rocky pavements and recurring ridges succumb to tides of sand.

Within hours, his thighs start to strain, and his breath comes shallowly, his chest inflating with only a great deal of effort. His limbs tremble and his extremities cool, even under the fierce glare of the dual suns, trained upon him like tractor beams. He believes they may as well be propelling him. He does not know where else he is getting the momentum to continue.

“Wrong again, little Jedi. The light only weakens you.”

The horizon is muddled by heat and the capricious landscape, but its hue is uniform. Beige and tan, with the occasional pocking boulder. This far from populous settlements it is a blank slate, unmarked. He can wander here and not see proof of himself.

“Shall I mark it for you?”

He stumbles, and the slight lapse in balance sends him down to his knees, hard.

“Such an easy target.” The voice is lascivious, hot in his ear. “You’re no challenge.”

He knows this game, knows his role in it. He digs his nails into the ground and conjures a retort from the debris of his larynx.

“Then you might actually win, for once.”

A mask of madness floats down to him. It’s intricate, crimson and onyx patterned in a humanoid masquerade, a crown of horns twined around it like briar. It sounds as wrecked as he does. It looks the way he feels.

“Suffering should have taught you better manners,” says Maul, and he slaps him, roughly, across the face.

He slumps onto porcelain, threaded with granite, tacky with blood. He crawls for a while, for many, many years, a decade or more of silence and secret desire. His fingers sift through cornsilk, touch lips that gasp in pleasure, or –

_I have loved you, always._

The Duchess is nobility, exemplified. She is an idealist in a universe doomed to repeated cycles of war. She is illicit potential, she is the exception that proves the rule.

Maul tilts the hourglass and he reconciles the beautiful cadaver with what is now only sand.

“Do you see my power now, Kenobi?”

He presses the granules to his mouth, where its fellows grind against his molars, grate within his skull.

He meets those yellow eyes, that frustration spreading chaos on impulse. “You are a spurned experiment. Betrayed. It has made you into this.”

A tongue darts out. “I am hunting you.”

“You are nothing but a beast.”

“Then let us compromise. I am a predator.” Maul takes his chin in a bruising sconce. “I have already devoured the bitch, and your sire, too. How long before I come upon the pup? Who will die for you then?”

Maul drags him closer despite his struggling, foul and snorting like a frenzied bantha. “Everything you were ever committed to defending has imploded on your watch. Are you the constant, Kenobi, an omen like me? We are the forsworn sons with dead and dying brothers, moulded by fate into paragons of solitude. Have we brought this misery upon ourselves?”

He tries, unsuccessfully, to push away. It saps his strength, fluid trickling down his cheekbone into the dirt; precious, precious, lost, it cannot be helped but it is unfair – so unfair.

“Well?”

“Whatever I am,” he says to the sharply-featured emblem of horror, this artificial evil, “it is enough to keep you at bay. To put you down for good.”

Maul chuckles, but it resonates strangely, thick with despair. His thumb smears the water over his grimy skin and into his hair, thoughtlessly.

“Dead men cannot kill,” says Maul, and it is almost a taunt, almost a warning.

He blinks himself back into a furious brown wind. It batters his robe into a manner of strangulation, and forces him up, into a tottering gait towards – something. He was going towards something important, something he needed, but it’s so difficult to remember exactly why he must pursue it instead of lying down and resting, just for a minute. He has been fighting battles for so long. He has injuries that must reknit. He has a small hand in his own that tugs at him urgently, and he thinks he should let it go.

He searches for two suns.

He lurches for this reason, why he has to get up and keep going. He figures it must be important.

*

He sees men degrade into hounds that lollop to the commands of their owner. They surround him, a loyal battalion regressed into a slavering pack.

_Two-hundred and twelfth. The pinnacle of the seventh sky._

He slips past them, but they sniff after him in earnest: they have been given the scent of his particular breed.

There is howling that buffets him. He feels as though he is being repelled.

Commander Cody picks up his lightsaber and clips it to his belt, fond. Had it escaped him again?

“Sorry about the execution, General.”

“You – you didn’t. You didn’t get me.”

Cracks meander through Cody’s helmet, not quite bursting the plasteel that had always made his laughter sound tinny. 

“Sure we did, sir.” He claps him warmly on the shoulder, and that fractures too. “Sure we did.”

They howl. He is still able to trick himself. He can believe it’s mournful.

*

He traipses through the night, in case he stops and stays that way. He shakes a droplet or two from his water bag and tackles another blinding, burning day, perhaps another night – he doesn’t keep track, he has bigger, better concerns. Whatever they are. His toes squelch in blood, and he loses consciousness once, maybe twice. The stars twinkle sorrowfully down at him and he’s cold, numb. He doesn’t know when his icy sweat had seeped down and frozen his bones. He doesn’t know why he can still smell smoke.

He sows time into the cosmos, watches it germinate. He had always had an aptitude for visions, and they flourish now, with no leashes to consider, to notify.

Ahead the light blinds him; beyond that a deluge of darkness, and again a supernova. Poetry, mistakes made and forgotten and repeated until there is nothing to salvage.

Behind him there is fire. He remembers nursery rhymes of demons that take form only when looked upon, and shuts his eyes, trips and crashes into matter that clogs his nose and mouth.

Don’t look back. There is nothing you can help, nothing that can help you.

He is being tossed to and fro, his robe whirling like a pennant, throttling him. Eddies of sand collide with a harsh wall of wind, and his hood is stripped back, his skin whipped raw; he is laid cleanly before the incisive eye of the universe, he is buried under its judgement.

He crawls, or tries to. His arms are full.

The queen gasps, and nothing comes out, her protestations strangled by a necklace of bruises. Her waifish frame sags under the weight of her overripe belly and her maidenly hair tangles over his lap, indecent, uncouth. She is not shielded by the raiment of her station, not in this.

“Padmé. I’m sorry.”

The words are stolen by the storm. They flit between the veil, where they might find purchase, useless as they are now. This woman had expired in a medical station, in the name of the Force, while he stood by. She had given up, broken-hearted, drowned in a vat of grief that Anakin mixed up himself. This orator, deprived of speech, this ruler outlawed in a corrupted kingdom. Killed by sadness. It is a wonder they did not languish together.

She breathes:

_Leia,_ the name of her regnal antecedent, a monarch four centuries dead.

_Luke,_ origin unknown.

The queen is crying. A ghost hovers behind him, seething at perceived slights, and she calls out for it in a crushing silence. He hears her all the same.

_Obi-Wan. There is good in him._

He finds that he is tired. Oh, he is so, so tired.

“You’re getting even older, old man.”

Anakin is twenty-three, the same age he was when Qui-Gon died in his arms. He knows by the wounds: Ventress’s parting gouge across one eye, the mechanical arm, the mistrustful glare. He always knows where Anakin is by his wounds.

Padmé evaporates, and is swallowed by the wind. Anakin remains obdurate, his tunic dark and neatly pleated, unsoiled by gore or volcanic spray. He is unaffected by the environment, by the hell he fought to escape and ended up creating across the Republic.

The Empire.

How could he forget? It is an empire now.

“You still have nothing to say to me? Are you that afraid?”

He wishes, with banal naivety, that Ahsoka were here. That he could hold Satine’s hand, or lean against Cody. They were blessings so small when they were freely available, miracles he counted as sweet but common, as reliable as infinity. He had expected those transient moments to outlast him, to survive the carnage of the war, even if he didn’t. He had always intended to have some kind of legacy, for Qui-Gon’s sake if not his own.

“That’s what I am, my Master. I am what you left behind.”

He looks down to where Padmé’s swollen little body had been, prostrate and breaking. He thinks, that dead woman was a senator that upheld the morale of a planet.

Ahsoka would have transformed the Order, inside it or out.

Depa was going to advance her teenage padawan to the rank of Knight.

Plo had a septet of identical doting sons. 

And those children, Anakin. _All those children._

He thinks, struggling to breathe, he thinks, I have avoided you long enough. He gets on all fours, because to stand would bowl him back ten klicks, all the way back to his hovel, and Force knows he hadn’t been solving anything in there. He manages to kneel. Anakin joins him, made of the detritus of the desert. He is close enough to touch.

“I am sorry,” he says, and it is the breaking of a seal, this communication. Anakin smirks, that smirk he’d loved and dreaded since it promised triumph, or mischief, or both. He solidifies before him, a towering, lithe, unbowed warrior. The champion, the prodigy, the chosen.

“I am sorry for the times I was not there for you.” He catches his gaze, his wayward padawan, his forbidden brother, rendered as perfectly present as he had been on the deck of the _Invisible Hand._ “But what you are is not only of my making. What you did was prompted, but not compelled. I will never forgive myself for allowing it to happen, but – but I cannot forgive you either.”

Anakin’s eyes are blue. Like a chemical fire.

“You betrayed everything we ever fought to protect. I don’t know what was worth that, Anakin. I don’t know what he promised you. If he was here I would rip the life from his wretched body, but I would ask him first – ask him what could provoke such – such hatred – for your family, your friends –,”

“Maybe it wasn’t just me,” says Anakin, softly, but he hears him plainly; he might have been speaking an inch away. “Maybe you’re worried it’s that easy, to embrace the Dark Side. Maybe it could happen to anyone. To you.”

“Maybe it could,” he whispers. “You were one of the strongest people I knew, until your fear clouded you. You were loved. Anakin, you were so loved.”

Anakin stares past him, and a muscle jumps in his jaw. He could have been pondering an invasion tactic for a Separatist outpost. If he squints, they might both be back around Admiral Yularen’s holoprojector, delegating mission after mission to millions of trained and trusted killers, puppets cheerfully dangling from the Chancellor’s fingers. And those had been the halcyon days.

“I’m saving her,” he says, beatifically. “I’m saving Padmé. I will save her and then Snips will come back and you’ll see, Master, you’ll see, won’t you? He will make you see, like he made me.”

He can lay claim to only paltry perception in these conditions, but he knows he wouldn’t want to bear witness to the lies Anakin was drip-fed even if he was whole. He thinks, it is un-Jedi of me, but I feel hate. I am weak, Master Qui-Gon, Master Yoda, I feel hatred for the Sith instead of compassion. I was attached to what they took from me; you can tell by the way I bleed, by the stump of what I am now.

“Anakin,” he says. His padawan is murky red, arteries like ribbons unspooling in the sand. He had always known when Anakin was in pain, because he could hide nothing – not his adoration for his lover or his pride for his student or his devotion to his teacher. The Force sang around him, made his light or his darkness expand like a shockwave that juddered the most insensate beings. For Obi-Wan, bonded to him for longer than Ahsoka, it assaulted him torrentially. It was like being chained to a meteor. 

He had enjoyed the ride. Until they made landfall with an explosion that decimated the galaxy.

“Anakin, you can’t be here.”

Anakin is melting like a wax candle, gristle sliding off his skeleton and into the hurricane.

“I’m always with you.” He groans, burnished by a toxic orange glow.

“No.” He’s imploring him now, knows he’s shouting, knows it’s ruining him inside and out. “You’re gone.”

“But not dead.” Anakin fetches up his only limb, white-hot metal thrust out towards him. “You didn’t kill me, remember? How could you not have killed me? Was I not unforgiveable? Did you not perceive my _wretched body_?”

He thinks, I saw my brother, I saw a monster. I loved you, I could not do it, but also – but also –

_I saw. I heard. I knew what you had done._

He had felt hatred.

“I’m sorry for our weakness.” He says it over and over, and Anakin reaches forever across hot coals. He had lain there, and he had wanted it to stop. Somehow, in their own monumentally execrable ways, they had both been trying to stop the torment, to end the war. Their war.

What is the result? What are the blossoming fruits of their vicious labour?

Firm hands turn him. His face scratches over the sand, and he chuckles, though it comes out as a wheeze.

The wind has ceased.

*

_Don’t –_

_Don’t –_

_Don’t you dare –_

*

He comes around sluggishly, his eyelashes glued together with gum from sleep. Every one of his joints seem to pop and creak when he braces himself to pat about for his bearings, disoriented.

He soon realises he’s lying on a mattress, instead of his usual clumping blankets. He doesn’t know where he is, precisely, but he knows that he feels distinctly like he’s been mown down by a droideka. That, and his bleary view of the ceiling is being blotted out by a halo of blond hair.

His innards rebel. He murmurs a faint prayer: Anakin, let me recoup, at least, give me a moment’s peace.

The mirage trills, “What’s Angking?”

“Kriff it all, Luke, get down from there!”

The man sounds irritated, and looks murderous, though it’s not directed at the toddler that scrambles away from the cot and across the room. A percussion of clanks and thuds denote his hurried progress, regardless.

He’s fast, he thinks, for a two-year old. He’s certainly sharper than I am.

The man returns to poking at a blocky datapad by his bedside, swearing in undertones at nothing in particular. If he focuses, he can distinguish Owen Lars from under that façade, can appreciate the bluster for what it is: waning patience.

He coughs, and it turns into a sputter. A straw towing a sleeve of water is ushered between his lips and he sucks at it greedily. His oesophagus feels like it has been dipped in acid.

When he recovers himself enough to sit up, grunting in pain, he sees his nurse; it is a fair-haired woman, busying herself by the washing station. Their meter is ticking over to a lurid amber, a caution, and he remembers with an unpleasant jolt that they’re in a drought. He remembers he has been without sufficient water for days, if not weeks. He remembers, flushing, that he had been searching for it, until –

“Good. You’re up.”

Owen leans down, and draws a long needle out of the crook of his arm. He hadn’t even noticed it was there, though he can’t seem to ignore the globule of blood that breaks its surface tension and winds, slowly, towards his wrist. Lost water. He shivers, aching all over.

“You still seeing things?”

Great. His crazy has been parading about without him. He shakes his head, mute.

“Even better.” He sops up the blood with a rag. “Your vitals have plateaued. You’re still dangerously dehydrated, and you’ll need to keep an eye on that heatstroke, but you’ll live.” Owen narrows his eyes, and invades his personal space. He is weather-beaten, brown as a nut, and has a new web of lines, but behind them the steel is untarnished, resilient as ever. “Is that what you want?”

He clears his throat, wishes he had something to drink. He spots a tiny disturbance by the doorway, and decides otherwise.

“Yes,” he says hoarsely. Owen looks sceptical, but gestures to the woman – Beru, he knows that – and she deposits an envelope of fortified vitamin paste on his knee.

“Eat up, then,” he says gruffly. “You need to get your strength back after that idiotic stunt you pulled. Messing about in the Dune Sea without the right gear, then dithering in a sandstorm? And here I thought that you… _people_ were supposed to be smart.”

“It’s a common misconception,” he replies, still barely an echo. Owen is unimpressed.

“You’re lucky.”

He summons a sour expression, injects a dose of incredulity for flavour.

“You are. The boy pitched such a tantrum we thought he’d blow a gasket. All I could do to get out there in time.”

He finds the toddler, wavering shyly between Beru’s legs and the farmhouse entrance. He smiles, and Luke Skywalker grins hesitantly back. He has not been this near since his friend’s son was a baby, and if he focuses the resemblance is almost uncanny; his round face and sweet disposition is a fitting tribute to his mother. He should have seen that first.

“Thank you, young one,” he tells him. Luke giggles and disappears entirely behind Beru.

“Half a day,” says Owen. He has trudged out to obscure his wife and ward, his fists full of drained intravenous cables. “Half a day to collect yourself. And then I want you gone.”

After that is no great trial to keep out of the way. Once he has made himself eat, wiped himself down and changed into a spare tunic, he stays mostly by the cot and gets reacquainted with his practically atrophied legs; he had been bedbound for almost three days, and his softening musculature had borne the brunt of his convalescence. He flexes as much as he can, imagines the trek back to his hut that will snatch his tenuous health again if he’s not careful. He’s aware he pushed his limits, perilously so. He hasn’t seen a mirror, and thinks it’s for the best – Beru sneaks glimpses of him like she’s convinced he’ll crumble into dust with any errant movement.

If he sits very still he can doze a little, coast the fringes of the meditative state. When he does this, and Owen has disappeared into the courtyard, Luke skitters closer, fascinated. He radiates light, and it is detectable no matter how shut off from the Force he has made himself. The signature is indelible. One coruscating half of a binary system.

He can imagine the girl, equally as bright. It warms him, even if he cannot yet dissolve the apprehension lodged deep in his chest. They’re safe, he tells himself obsessively. They’re safe. He trusts the cleverness of Bail and Breha. He can trust Owen’s ferocity.

His back tingles, and he opens his eyes to find Beru watching him. She holds up his worn pack, bulging now with MREs and four travel bags of water, then produces a spigot from the pocket of her apron.

“For the saguaro,” she explains curtly. “If your rations deplete again, before the mercantile tribes pass you. They’re due up north in a fortnight.”

“Th – thank you. You don’t have to –,”

“Get up,” she says brusquely, tossing him his repaired robe and rucksack. When she occupies herself with a similar garment and a bandolier of supplies, he peeks inside of it, guilty but unbearably curious. Along with the victuals are his old clothes, washed and sewn into something presentable.

His heart hurts. It’s a bump compared to its usual pummelling, but still.

Beru slips into her own accoutrements, and is unfazed when he falters, uncertain about her intentions.

“You’re coming with me?”

“You’re skin and bone. We won’t be picking up after you a second time.”

It is the kind of statement that should warrant defensive sarcasm, but he knows when he’s in disgrace. He accepts theirs, adds it to his own mountain.

He has only just garbed himself when she beckons him out into the glaze of the two suns, where the ground is pale and the main vaporator hums loudly, a fixture within the honeycomb array of the homestead. Owen hoists Luke on his hip by the entrance dome’s doorway, as though he wants to see them off, or just see him out. The farmer is still magnanimous enough to nod, jerkily, at his quiet but earnest thanks as they pass. Luke waves nervously.

“Bye, Ben.” He stutters over the unfamiliar syllable.

“Goodbye, Luke.” He smiles again, unable to resist it, and his shattered memories coalesce into reciprocating joy. It blooms so broadly. It flows from such an unassuming source.

Luke stretches out to him, but Owen is turning away, and Beru pointedly dials the antechamber door open. She stands to the side to see him through, and locks it behind her.

The desert is calmer today, the air hot when it journeys in and out of his lungs. The Great Chott flats span a wide expanse around the Lars home, ashy and quiet, only disrupted by the occasional speeder bike zooming in the distance, their riders anonymous in helmets and ersatz armour. A lone wild eopie brays when they crest into the arroyos, and sandstone rises either side of them, making a valley of their path. He has never felt smaller.

When Beru’s disapprobation peaks, the suns have melted and been smudged into streaks of incandescent cirrus cloud. They are close to dusk and his hut, and he’s grown so used to her toneless reminders about venomous snakes and carnivorous flytraps that his guard is fully down. He’s already sweating and shuddering from only two brief rests, his feet chafing, and he flinches when she speaks.

“That can’t happen again.”

She doesn’t pause, so he doesn’t either. They walk for another minute before he can bring himself to respond, his shame so potent she must be able to perceive it from six feet away.

“I agree,” he murmurs eventually. “My actions were foolish, and it is inexcusable that I put your husband at risk.” He lowers his head. “You have my apologies.”

Beru bats a dying creosote out of her way. Tiny evergreen leaves cling to her robe like burrs.

“Thanks for that,” she says, “but how do I know?”

He frowns. “I will repay your charity, of course, and do my best to supply anything else you require. Please do not think I am not grateful, or that I am not sincere about –,”

“That’s all very well,” she says, and falls back to stride abreast of him, her face shiny from the exertion of the day. “But how do I know you’re sorry enough to make sure it won’t happen again? Because you almost died.”

He purses his lips, unable to formulate a counterargument.

“Kenobi, a sandstorm almost killed you. The legends used to say you wizard types were like gods.”

“The legends were wrong.” An understatement. He doesn’t like to think what such a fantastical fable would make of a leviathan like Palpatine.

Beru crunches along over gravel for a while longer, as though satiated, but he knows she’s biding her time, feeling him out. He congratulates her on the effort, almost enquires what conclusions she has derived from scrutinising the husk of a Jedi General. There are legions now that would pay handsomely for such an opportunity.

“Owen asked you, earlier, if you wanted to live. Can you tell me the truth?”

He looks up at her. She is grim, but staunch, knowing his history and prepared for anything that might hurtle out of it. He supposes she deserves his honesty, for such a display of courage. Even if his honesty makes him ill.

“Sometimes,” he attempts, heavily, “sometimes it’s difficult to know. My – my memories are powerful things, and I – I have a lot of regrets. To put it mildly.”

“And you fail to take care of yourself.”

He tries to see nothing but the sky. It’s patchwork, flame licking across the planet, consuming, demanding. He doesn’t know how to describe just how impossible it is, how enervating, to run from daylight – what he would call fire, the truth. Everything can seem so futile.

“Yes. But really, you don’t have to – not that your concern isn’t appreciated –,”

“I don’t much care what you do.” She stops, turns to him. He must see her in her entirety: she is a product of hardship, roughened by the unending tribulations of a desolate planet. Her callouses have callouses. She has not been exposed to the true horrors of war, but she must have known loss, and struggle, and pain. Her extended family is teeming with it.

“It would be easier if your troubles were yours alone,” she says tartly, “but that’s not how it is. Right?”

He shrinks, but he knows that while he may gamble with his own life –

“I have not put your family in danger,” he informs her, fear like ice in his gut. “No matter my personal issues, I said I would protect –,”

“How are you going to protect him if you’re dead?” she snaps. “We see him growing, and we know that we’re not enough to contain whatever is going to explode out of him one day. He’s the best thing that ever happened to us, but we’re not _stupid_ , we know the stock he comes from, we know the sort of monsters want his head.”

Twilight settles in misty shades of lavender and blue, the curtain falling on another cycle. Salamanders skitter up and observe the noise, eyes beady black like the lenses of scouting droids.

He runs his fingers through limp, brittle hair, curling almost to his clavicle. A mess.

“You… you’re right.” He sighs. “I designated myself his guardian. It is my responsibility to be there should – should anything happen. Which it won’t, Beru, you have my assurances on that. This is the safest place in the galaxy for Luke.”

_Who in their right mind would hide Anakin Skywalker’s child on Tatooine?_

Who in their right mind would think to look there?

“For now,” she warns. “He’s ours, but – in case – in case they do come – he’s going to need you to guide him, all right, Owen hates it but he will, he’s going to need someone to keep him from getting lost in the stars.” She sniffles, and tries to muffle it in her shoulder. “We’re just farmers.”

He thinks, and I was just a pawn. Whatever our lot in life, we all fail, or rise above it. Beru would know this, stewing in oscillating poverty, would know the mantra that not having enough means you still have something.

He left his hut for a reason.

“I will try,” he begins, and grimaces from the imaginary whack of a gimer stick. “I mean, I will be his guardian. I will… I will not let him fall prey to my mistakes. Or his father’s.”

The future is bright, with laserfire or the Force. He figures he’ll know one way or the other, in time.

“Neither will we,” she says stolidly, as their pace resumes. “We’ll keep him away from that magic nonsense, and the Empire won’t take any note of us. As for his father – well, he’s a dead pilot. That’s all he’ll ever know about him.”

Once he might have made a case for Anakin’s grin, his sense of humour, his bravery, his selflessness, his loyalty to his men and his unparalleled skill. Now, of course, he may as well be lying.

Night encroaches, and Beru drops him on his doorstep, handing over another bag of water and scoffing when he tries to refuse it.

“Don’t be an idiot. The Jawas will be up around here soon, but until then, you need it. We’ll be okay.”

He takes it reluctantly, but stows it to expedite their inevitable parting. He has kept her from her family for too long.

“Oh, and – well, Owen found this too.”

She draws a cylindrical silver rod from a pouch at her waist, and hands it over.

“Almost forgot.”

“As did I,” he says, doleful. The lightsaber clicks onto his belt, incongruous as an extra finger.

He is about to deliver another rambling, awkward bout of thanks when Beru steps forward and dusts off his front, straightening the creases of his tunic. She’s younger than him, but she fusses like he’s her infant ward, like he’s worth preserving for better things.

“Hydrate throughout the day,” she says. “Don’t waste water by using the ‘fresher.” She removes herself, hefts her pack like its considerable size weighs nothing. “And don’t pity yourself so much. Remember you have a job.”

He smiles. He thinks, my failure will kill me, but you need not worry. I will not let that happen to Luke.

He says, “My lesson was cruel, but I learned. I know my purpose.”

Voices swarm in a cacophony, and shadows grasp at him from the distant dark. His demons have already taken form; they lurk around every corner, erode his defences, and assault him when he’s at his most vulnerable. They are feral, outside of his control.

Yet he is not without means. He is not flipped, exposed, split for feeding. He won’t be while the Skywalker name has a use for him.

There is laughter – a rippling scream –

_Look ahead, Master, Knight, Padawan. Look ahead._

He knows. The future is bright.

*

For years, he dreams in black-and-white. A boy he may have known comes to him periodically, with tears streaming down his face.

He whispers, “I had a nightmare.”

He, Old Ben Kenobi, will always hold out his arm.

Not:

_Again?_

_About?_

_Anakin…_

But:

“I know.”

And, “me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> * Highly recommend [Sam Witwer's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrkFj6iepMs) analysis of Darth Maul and Obi-Wan after Order 66. It's devastating, and brilliant.
> 
> * Come yell at me about a star war


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